America is a land of haves and have-nots when it comes to broadband Internet. While many of us enjoy downloads speeds of 50 or even 100 Mbps, 119 million Americans lack broadband access (defined as 4Mbps down and 1Mbps up). Out of those 119 million, 19 million live in areas where there is no option to buy a wired broadband connection, according to government data.

Wouldn't it be great if we could provide broadband speed to nearly every American, without costly construction projects to bring cables to the home? Apparently, we already can. At least that's what providers of satellite broadband Internet services said today in a panel at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Latest-generation satellites operated by HughesNet and ViaSat offer 10 to 15 Mbps down and 1 to 3 Mbps up to nearly any home in the US, representatives of those companies said. They believe the industry simply suffers from an awareness problem. Previous-generation satellite products offered only a fraction of that speed, and even people who realize satellite is available to them may not know that the latest products are as fast as they are.

"Satellite now is a viable option for millions and millions of consumers, with speeds of 10 to 15 Mbps," said HughesNet director of sales Allen McCabe. "We're a real player."

If you live in a major city with access to cable Internet or FiOS, there is probably little reason to even consider satellite Internet. You may already have higher speeds, higher data caps (or no caps), and less latency. Say you're a fan of online multiplayer first-person shooters: satellite is not for you, at least if you want to win.

"We can't get around physics and the speed of light," said Dan Turak, VP of sales and distribution at ViaSat Communications. "We have about a half-second latency. The only time latency becomes an issue is for a gamer. We're very clear to that customer that you'll probably lose if you're playing against someone without satellite broadband. That latency is just enough to cause delay."

But for voice over Internet services, video streaming, and just about any other type of Web surfing, the service is perfectly fine, they said. It's also much better than what's available to a huge number of Americans: those who are stuck on dial-up or terrible DSL.

"Even though we have a national footprint our market area isn't really downtown Chicago," Turak said. "Those people are served. They have Comcast, Time Warner, Verizon, or AT&T." Satellite providers are trying to sign up the people who "have no Internet. They have dial-up. Or they have poor Internet. And that's our market area."

Best option for some, not the best service for all

ViaSat's Exede service launched last year as a major improvement over WildBlue. It offers 12Mbps down and 3Mbps up across all of its plans, differentiating tiers not by speed but by data usage. Usage is unlimited from midnight to 5am, but metered at all other times of the day. $50 a month gets you 10GB per month, $80 equates to 15GB, and $130 provides 25GB.

Hughes charges between $40 and $100 a month, with speeds ranging from 10 to 15 Mbps down and 1 to 2 Mbps up, and data limits of 20 to 40GB per month. Satellite bandwidth is not limitless: both Hughes and ViaSat have optimized their service for download speeds, saying in their experience customers care much less about upload speeds.

While Dish Network or DirecTV services are one-way broadcasts, Hughes and ViaSat home systems receive and transmit.

McCabe explains the process thusly: "The request for a website goes out from the computer to the modem, out to the dish and transmits to the satellite. It bounces back down to the ViaSat and Hughes ground-based stations, which we call gateways. Those gateways have large antennas that pick up the signal from the consumer's home, what website they want to go to, and using the terrestrial system connect with the Internet, grab the data, take it back to the gateway, shoot it back up to the sky and back down to the consumer's home."

"It sounds like an enormous process. It takes less than a second," he said. "The signals travels almost 90,000 miles, up and down, up and down again into the Internet and back."

The Hughes and ViaSat footprints are roughly the same, covering the continental US, Hawaii, and most of the Alaskan population. "We use spot beam technology," Turak said. "We have beams across the country. Our subscribers are provisioned under very specific beams. … We have a beam over a part of Alaska where most of the population is. It's a huge state."

Any satellite dish that goes onto a consumer's home must be installed by a certified technician to ensure it has line of sight access to the satellite in the sky. The likes of Dish Network and DirecTV resell Hughes and ViaSat Internet services. Hughes and ViaSat satellites also provide in-flight Internet access to some airlines.

There are also satellite Internet products for businesses, and for emergency responders who need mobile rather than fixed access. For residences, Turak said ViaSat plans to add voice service in the first quarter this year.

HughesNet has 640,000 consumer subscribers, and more than two million installations including business customers. While HughesNet and ViaSat could grow substantially just by signing up more underserved customers, lack of awareness is among the biggest roadblocks. They're trying to solve that in part by advertising to Dish and DirecTV customers.

When asked if more satellites would be needed to cover all of the underserved population, McCabe said, "We both know we're going to have to build more satellites. There is a max capacity." McCabe didn't say how many subscribers can be served by today's satellites, saying it depends on usage patterns, whether customers use Internet just for e-mail or also for streaming video and gaming.

ViaSat has 140Gbps capacity with its ViaSat-1 satellite, which we wrote about after its launch last year.

Since expanding broadband access is a stated goal of the US government, panelists said they would like to see US officials pay more attention to satellite. Panel moderator Joseph Widoff, executive director of the Satellite Broadcasting and Communications Association, said discussions around the National Broadband Plan have focused too much on costly infrastructure projects to bring fiber to the home.

"There's a lot of places [cable and FiOS buildouts] are never going to go, and from my perspective it seems like there's not a lot of talk about the fact that they could be covered tomorrow," Widoff said. "If the government wants to throw money around, subsidize satellite broadband and it will happen literally overnight, or as long as it takes to ship the product out."

McCabe won't whine if satellite companies don't get more government support, but he won't turn it down, either.

"Most of the business is built on the enterprise system and not with government handouts," McCabe said. "I certainly won't sit here and say we wouldn't enjoy seeing some more [government] support for our technology. If they're going to support broadband in general they should support satellite because it's a really viable product in this market."

Promoted Comments

It's not just speed, latency and bandwidth caps, it's also price. It's sad to see just how very slowly the price on satellite broadband is falling. A $50 minimum for service, while much faster cable/DSL is under $20. Not only can't they compete with landlines, they're seriously disadvantaged compared to Cell service. While cell phone coverage isn't everywhere yet, it is pretty deep, and always going further into more rural areas.

With lower prices, satellite internet service would see a real uptick. But for now, there's endless stories out there of people going to extremes to get a wifi signal from point A to point B, because one location can get DSL or cable, while the other one (less than a mile away) cannot. If satellite was less pricey, that kind of effort wouldn't make sense. But it looks like it'll be quite a while before satellite operators really start feeling the pricing pressure.

The problem isn't awareness. It's a perception problem. How many times has satellite been dismissed on Ars (not by the staff, just the readers)?

Sorry, it's not a perception problem, it's a this-is-really-crappy-and-barely-worth-the-cost-compared-to-dial-up problem.

I had satellite Internet for 7 years, and hated pretty much every second of it. $80 a month for 1.5Mbps/256Kbps and 17GB data cap. At those speeds and cost, dial-up is pretty attractive for $10 a month. Luckily I was able to get onto Verizon Home Fusion last month and love the crap out of it. $90 a month for ~18Mbps/~12Mbps and 20GB data cap. The big problem now is how fast I can blow through my data cap.

Also, when the satellite ISPs state speeds of 12Mbps/3Mbps, they should be taken with several grains of salt, and the, at best, ~300 millisecond ping times are disruptive to more than just game playing over their service. And you better not have too many clouds in your area -- a relatively thick cloud deck will kill your Internet connection -- it's far more fragile than TV satellite connections.

btw: I have some satellite Internet hardware for sale if anyone is interested!

Satellite internet providers are not competing with DSL, fiber, WiMax, LTE, cable modem, or anything else. They are intended and designed for those who cannot get DSL, fiber, WiMax, LTE, cable modem, or anything else. The price reflects the cost of the technology. Nobody is signing up for satellite internet if they can get anything else but dialup. That's the whole point.

As they say: you can take it or leave it.

By the way, for those of you who do not understand the math, here's some data to help you understand the data caps on satellite internet. For example, Netflix can be set up in three quality settings: 1) Good quality (up to 0.3 GB per hour) 2) Better quality (up to 0.7 GB per hour) 3) Best quality (up to 1 GB per hour, or up to 2.3 GB per hour for HD)

If you're watching HD, you're better off with Dish Network's DVR plans which quietly fill up the free space on your hard disk with HD on-demand titles over the satellite signal (not internet). They distributed "I am Legend" in HD 1080p (yes, "p" for "progressive") this way some years ago.

My in-laws used to have Hughes satellite internet, as recently as a year ago. It was awful. They were lucky to get 1 megabit down, and usage was throttled even lower once you went over 250MB in a rolling 24-hour period. Or you could upgrade to the business tier, for another $30/mo to make the limit 1GB, if I remember right. Also, if it snowed, you'd have to get up on the roof and brush off the dish.

I'd say the real problem is the caps. I would much rather a slower connection with higher caps so I feel confident that I can actually use my bandwidth than worry about going well over with fast Internet. How long would it take to hit the 10gb limit using HD netflix?

As someone who grew up in the middle of nowhere and who still has parents in the middle of nowhere, the Caps are to low and I feel any cap service that has a cap lower then 250GB should not count as broadband period.

10GB for $50 is a inprovment I still remeber grwoing up 5GB fo $70..... that was 5 to 7 years ago.

"Satellite vendors say they can fill America's broadband gap"? Unfortunately for them, current customers are vocal about how expensive and crappy and cappy their service is. Satellite internet should only be considered in the most remote and extreme locations.

It's not just speed, latency and bandwidth caps, it's also price. It's sad to see just how very slowly the price on satellite broadband is falling. A $50 minimum for service, while much faster cable/DSL is under $20. Not only can't they compete with landlines, they're seriously disadvantaged compared to Cell service. While cell phone coverage isn't everywhere yet, it is pretty deep, and always going further into more rural areas.

With lower prices, satellite internet service would see a real uptick. But for now, there's endless stories out there of people going to extremes to get a wifi signal from point A to point B, because one location can get DSL or cable, while the other one (less than a mile away) cannot. If satellite was less pricey, that kind of effort wouldn't make sense. But it looks like it'll be quite a while before satellite operators really start feeling the pricing pressure.

I find myself agreeing with every single comment on this post (new record?).

With caps that low, how could I be confident I could get any real work done, or entertainment? Just the other day I uploaded about 15 gigabytes of data into Google Music... that would be impossible under such a limited plan.

I also tend to wonder what the benefit of caps are to the consumer. Are there any technical or strategic reason to offer them except to gouge customers who need more? It's difficult to track how much you use (by app or in total), and what does it really gain the satellite company except extremely angry customers who run up their data and can't use their connection anymore (or it costs ridiculous amounts)?

It's not just speed, latency and bandwidth caps, it's also price. It's sad to see just how very slowly the price on satellite broadband is falling. A $50 minimum for service, while much faster cable/DSL is under $20.\

Not sure where you are friend, but $50 is cheaper than anything I can get being next to Philadelphia and with comparable speeds.

Its interesting that they think only gamers would suffer from the latency issues. What about VoIP / skype?

Chatting with a buddy across the world with 300ms latency is fine. Add another 500ms latency on top of that, and it starts to become a problem. Anyone who has ever had a conversation with a 1second round-trip knows what im talking about.

I wonder what it would do to the % to outlaw exclusive contracts with landlords and municipalities. in fargo nd they have midco and cableone...the later has a lock down on both the building and part of town i am in. both would need to be reversed to change it as cable is included in rent in this building and many around it. thanks to them i have to pay for 3.38 down and .28 up... thanks cableone

The problem isn't awareness. It's a perception problem. How many times has satellite been dismissed on Ars (not by the staff, just the readers)?

Sorry, it's not a perception problem, it's a this-is-really-crappy-and-barely-worth-the-cost-compared-to-dial-up problem.

I had satellite Internet for 7 years, and hated pretty much every second of it. $80 a month for 1.5Mbps/256Kbps and 17GB data cap. At those speeds and cost, dial-up is pretty attractive for $10 a month. Luckily I was able to get onto Verizon Home Fusion last month and love the crap out of it. $90 a month for ~18Mbps/~12Mbps and 20GB data cap. The big problem now is how fast I can blow through my data cap.

Also, when the satellite ISPs state speeds of 12Mbps/3Mbps, they should be taken with several grains of salt, and the, at best, ~300 millisecond ping times are disruptive to more than just game playing over their service. And you better not have too many clouds in your area -- a relatively thick cloud deck will kill your Internet connection -- it's far more fragile than TV satellite connections.

btw: I have some satellite Internet hardware for sale if anyone is interested!

Sorry Ars...this is a let down of an article as it sticks remakably close to the press release topics without discussing the major problems with the satellite isp duopoly. I'm stuck with using a satellite ISP at home. And the issue is not about speeds, it's about CAPS that are too low for speed to make a difference.

At 15Mb/s, netflix will consumer the basic monthly cap in about one evening of viewing. I cannot download the Witcher 2 without exceeding my monthly cap. I cannot use cloud based services like backups, or icloud, or whatever, without exceeding my monthly cap.

So, what is the point of really fast download rates when you've ruled out the poissibility of watching online video, large files downloads, or cloud services? Yes, web browsing will be slightly faster, but web browsing was never a real issue before either.

And in point of fact, depending on the service tier subscribed to, viasat's exede service offers slightly lower monthly caps than the old wild blue accounts did since they now combine upload and download together.

Even ignoring the massive pricing problem, a satellite ISP is only an option to consider if you can't get DSL or cable. If you can, then my advice would be to count your blessings and tell exede/HN to sod off. If you can't, then welcome to my personal hell.

Satellite internet providers are not competing with DSL, fiber, WiMax, LTE, cable modem, or anything else. They are intended and designed for those who cannot get DSL, fiber, WiMax, LTE, cable modem, or anything else. The price reflects the cost of the technology. Nobody is signing up for satellite internet if they can get anything else but dialup. That's the whole point.

As they say: you can take it or leave it.

By the way, for those of you who do not understand the math, here's some data to help you understand the data caps on satellite internet. For example, Netflix can be set up in three quality settings: 1) Good quality (up to 0.3 GB per hour) 2) Better quality (up to 0.7 GB per hour) 3) Best quality (up to 1 GB per hour, or up to 2.3 GB per hour for HD)

If you're watching HD, you're better off with Dish Network's DVR plans which quietly fill up the free space on your hard disk with HD on-demand titles over the satellite signal (not internet). They distributed "I am Legend" in HD 1080p (yes, "p" for "progressive") this way some years ago.

The correct answer for this problem is publicly funded fiber rollout, and then lease the lines to any provider for a set fee. The taxpayer recoups the rollout costs, and we all get SIGNIFICANTLY more competition in the broadband market.

I wonder what it would do to the % to outlaw exclusive contracts with landlords and municipalities. in fargo nd they have midco and cableone...the later has a lock down on both the building and part of town i am in. both would need to be reversed to change it as cable is included in rent in this building and many around it. thanks to them i have to pay for 3.38 down and .28 up... thanks cableone

I used to have Midco, and it sucks ass. Although my other option is no better. The joys of living in small town USA.

It's not just speed, latency and bandwidth caps, it's also price. It's sad to see just how very slowly the price on satellite broadband is falling. A $50 minimum for service, while much faster cable/DSL is under $20.

how are you getting cable/dsl for under $20? ten years ago I was paying $30/mo for Time Warner 10/1, now it's $55/mo for the same 10/1. the local DSL is both slower and more expensive.

The costs are prohibitive for fiber in rural areas. It costs between $4,000 and $12,000 to provision a home for fiber service. DSL is cheapest because phone lines are already there. HFC cable modems are most efficient since cable is cheap and usually already there, but it does require a fiber backhaul. WiMax and the 4Gs (LTE, HSPA+) are excessively costly due to laughably tiny coverage of between two and six miles radius from the tower and all of the 4G data plans for home use do have data caps.

My mom has Hughes. When it's good it's like a broadband connection with bad latency (you can tell, even just viewing websites). When it's bad it barely works at all. If I could get her on anything else other than an old school modem I would. The data caps are also a huge issue. They are understandable, unlike the unnecessary data caps of terrestrial providers, but they are still a big problem.

It's not just speed, latency and bandwidth caps, it's also price. It's sad to see just how very slowly the price on satellite broadband is falling. A $50 minimum for service, while much faster cable/DSL is under $20. Not only can't they compete with landlines, they're seriously disadvantaged compared to Cell service. While cell phone coverage isn't everywhere yet, it is pretty deep, and always going further into more rural areas.

With lower prices, satellite internet service would see a real uptick. But for now, there's endless stories out there of people going to extremes to get a wifi signal from point A to point B, because one location can get DSL or cable, while the other one (less than a mile away) cannot. If satellite was less pricey, that kind of effort wouldn't make sense. But it looks like it'll be quite a while before satellite operators really start feeling the pricing pressure.

rcxb raises two excellent points regarding the lagging price/value curve of satellite Internet and access to broadband in rural areas.

I wonder if the new, cheaper satellite lift capabilities being developed by SpaceX will have an impact on the price and performance of satellite Internet by reducing launch costs, which may in turn have the effect of decreasing the unit cost of the satellite itself (a virtuous cycle)? This reduced cost cycle may also enable satellite providers to move new, lower-power / higher performance technology into space more quickly than with traditional launch services where the entire launch cost is in the $1B range, which precludes much of any ability to decrease bandwidth costs.

Regarding the second issue of increasing cellular-based Internet access in rural areas, it seems like cellular providers could increase cellular access by building hybrid satellite-based LTE towers in locations where installing a back-haul landline to support the tower is impractical, thus mitigating the need to hardwire a home for satellite access while increasing benefits to rural customers who could then have access to broadband both in their home and out on their land.

Real-world latency on Hughes at my folks' house in the country is about 2000ms in my experience (as in 2 whole seconds). Click. Wait a few heartbeats. Then content starts to load (assuming your reequest was acknowledged). It's worse on major websites that load sequentially since dependencies need to be resolved. Some websites just don't load - probably due to timeouts. Other network applications just can't handle the long latency period. Takes my father some 5-10 minutes to VPN in to work thanks to all the 2-way handshaking - driving to work is sometimes required in order to do anything involving significant amounts of data.

If Hughes et al want to improve their perception (for WWW content anyway), they need to take a page out of Amazon's book with the Silk browser and minimize the delay as much as physics allow for - fetch content at their base station where latency is in the 10s of milliseconds then serve up the entire page in a single chunk ... or serve popular stuff from cache. I recall the article from last year about Exede talked about some architecture changes to attack the latency problem

Even if the latency doesn't bother you personally, the caps are a problem. Watch a few youtube videos or (attempt to) do some video chatting and you'll flatten that daily quota in a hurry. The sat ISP's need to find some other way to manage congestion (perhaps some prioritization scheme based on how many bits you've consumed in some rolling period); if they want to tweak revenue-per-subscriber, they should offer service tiers beyond quota allotments.

I got the folks a USB modem for wireless internet that works great - rock-solid connectivity without special placement nor an external antenna. Monthly bandwidth cap is lower (not much of an issue for them anyway) and the price is about the same, but the latency is in the double-digits and the throughput is substantially higher. In another couple of weeks, the Hughes dish will go quiet and I'll consider the additional device on my wireless bill a blessing in terms of less calls for help.

I don't know what the consumer-facing marketing will look like, but that's the most honesty I think I've seen from the satellite guys about their internet access product. Basically they're admitting "if you get decent terrestrial broadband to your house, then you're not our customer, but if you have no other option..."

BTW, I imagine you get used to it, but 1/2-second latency would drive me insane. The only way satellite could ever be a true competitor would be if they ever figured out how to do it from an LEO constellation (i.e. Iridium). You'd cut that latency way down. But we know what an excellent return on investment Iridium ended up having.

I will note, however, that Iridium had the handicap of trying to provide service to a portable handset. In the case of internet access, you would give up on portability. You could make both the satellite cheaper and the consumer-side transmitter/receiver cheaper if battery life were not a concern.

It would still share the same problem as Iridium, though, in that putting up a constellation of satellites is really expensive compared to stretching some wires/fiber through a housing development.

We had about 12 sites on HughesNet using the new Ka band dishes all over southern Texas. At most of the sites there was no other option, it was Hughes or pay $8000 a month for a T1. They worked extremely well, never had rain fade, and besides the ~800ms latency (with a IPSec tunnel) the bandwidth was actually what they promised.

Typing on a SSH console was sluggish, but the bulk data transfers we did could saturate the pipe we paid for.

When you live in the middle of nowhere with no land-based options, and are coming from dial-up like my father in rural GA, satellite internet is fantastic. Sure, something land-based would be ideal, but my father has been ecstatic about his for the last year, relative to the dial-up he finally ditched.

Actually the latency, which is closer to 800msec, is not just a problem for gamers. The way today's web pages work, there are many requests and round-trips involved, especially when using https. You make the first hit to a page, and pay your first latency. Then that HTML calls for perhaps a dozen other downloads. Your second payment. Some of those will call for further downloads, giving you your third, and so on. With https this is all doubled due to the encryption protocol.

For this reason, satellite is NOT a viable solution for broadband, and it is horrible that the satellite companies suck up so much of the federal broadband stimulus funding. If we can't come to our senses and treat broadband like the basic utility it now is, at least send this money to Verizon and AT&T so they can beef up their tower penetration in rural areas up their capacity so as to offer larger caps.

I also suspect the 19 million needing these solutions is a lower estimate, although of course I'm biased since I'm one of them.

For 99% of people and their use cases, this would probably be quite good. A lot of people are looking at the caps but, for the target audience (not a lot of people who are serious about streaming media/Internet connectivity live in the middle of nowhere), they sound suitable. Standard rule of thumb for VoIP latency is 250ms but you can get by alright on around 600 ms providing you've decent echo cancellation and correct QoS setup and I think VoIP's the killer app for this, were they to push it. These are kinda interesting, guess pricing is the big thing here but can't comment on that (no reference for this) though it'd be whether having any Internet is worth the money.

People suggesting 3G and LTE stuff, how is that being backhauled from the towers? UK generally uses fibre which would suggest an infrastructure growing to reach the remotes - is that happening here? Fibre reach still isn't that long that you could pull from too far out hat a simple PoP couldn't be deployed otherwise. Might be different out there, of course.

SAT has 3 major issues that have to be addressed, and none of them are that customers are unaware (to the contrary):1. They cost way to much2. They are adversly affected by weather3. They have a persistent (read ongoing) reputation for being terrible

rcxb wrote:

It's not just speed, latency and bandwidth caps, it's also price. It's sad to see just how very slowly the price on satellite broadband is falling. A $50 minimum for service, while much faster cable/DSL is under $20. Not only can't they compete with landlines, they're seriously disadvantaged compared to Cell service.

And usually bundled with other services as well, like local land line or sat tv or cable tv dependent on the carrier. $50 for 15--and a blow your own head off ping--does not typically appeal to most of the people who would "care" how fast the DL speed is beyond checking their email. Sadly, many consumers are easily talked into upgrading to higher service packages thinking it will improve ping. Yeah, higher downstream sync rate improves ping. And pigs can fly to China if you stick a firecracker up their ho-ha.

In reality, a 3 meg or even a 1.5 provisioned and groomed line can trounce a 50Mbps cable line if the latency is good. Thanks to token vs trunk, that can often be the case.

Quote:

While cell phone coverage isn't everywhere yet, it is pretty deep, and always going further into more rural areas.

And most folks that have one in their home will tell you how fast they reach their data cap when using their hotspot; Forget about the folks in the boonies the sat companies are talking about; those folks are using a femtocell more likely than not; or stepping outside to hang off the powerlines when they want to make a call.

I disagree with this as a solution until a couple congressmen get together away from their lobbyists and start actually looking at what can be downloaded in a month of 20 gig allowance. Or 2 in a cell providers case.

Quote:

With lower prices, satellite internet service would see a real uptick. But for now, there's endless stories out there of people going to extremes to get a wifi signal from point A to point B, because one location can get DSL or cable, while the other one (less than a mile away) cannot. If satellite was less pricey, that kind of effort wouldn't make sense. But it looks like it'll be quite a while before satellite operators really start feeling the pricing pressure.

QFT, but not always the issue being the provider. there's a lot of paperwork involved in cutting through a road. It is probably less the mile in difference than the local or state government dragging heels with permissions to cut through 16 ft of asphalt. But this actually enforces the point: where the lines are greatly impacts who can get the service.

Sounds like those of you who have used satelite have used the old networks. My Mother in law has Excede, with a brand new satelite and modem. There is no broadband, or even cell phone reception where she lives. So she qualified for a special government plan that is offered by wildblue "US Recovery ACT". I could have got her the faster 15 MBPS speeds, but the caps were a problem. She's on the mid-tier "recovery act" plan, she gets 3 MBPS down, 1 MBPS UP. 27GB Bandwidth cap, for 69.95 a month, no installation or equipment fee's.

It was by far the best deal, as she has no real need for more then 3 MBPS, she mostly uses it for internet, email, and netflix, and even netflix HD will stream fine though her Roku. With 27GB cap she can netflix quite a few video's per month, a mix of standard def and high def. She live's alone, and it's the only bandwidth intensitve thing she does. It's still many hours of video.

I tested it with a speed test and it consistantly gets advertised speeds. Ping's around 700 MS. It's pretty quick for web browsing, youtube etc.

Wildblue has no daily CAP, but some of the other providers do, I always thought that was pretty lame. Wildblue's website also tracks your usage so you can log in at anytime and see how much bandwidth you have left.

She's used the service on some pretty cloudy days, service outage is fairly rare.

It's expensive, high latency and a last resort, but dial-up is un-usable on today's internet. It's not like it was 10 or 15 years ago, the internet is just not designed for that anymore. It takes 4 minutes just to load ebay on dial up. Vs a few seconds on satelite.

Also, as previously mentioned, 12:00 to 5:00 AM is unmetered. So you can upload large amounts of data and use cloud services and download large games etc during this time with no impact on your cap.

Latest-generation satellites operated by HughesNet and ViaSat offer 10 to 15 Mbps down and 1 to 3 Mbps up to nearly any home in the US, representatives of those companies said. They believe the industry simply suffers from an awareness problem.

She's used the service on some pretty cloudy days, service outage is fairly rare.

It's expensive, high latency and a last resort, but dial-up is un-usable on today's internet. It's not like it was 10 or 15 years ago, the internet is just not designed for that anymore. It takes 4 minutes just to load ebay on dial up. Vs a few seconds on satelite.

The rest of this post post covers what I wanted to say but is better written (too much to drink).Interested in that first line, rain fade would be an issue with heavy cloud cover - standard meteorological radar scans would show it. Again, shouldn't drop signal but would disrupt comms slightly unless its particularly heavy.